


The Gates of Breath

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Merlin - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:57:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because you go hunting for the tomb of a mythical wizard doesn't mean you actually expect to find it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gates of Breath

The mountains of Wales spread out before them, all misty valleys and wooded hills and secrets. They're beyond the reach of motorways and billboards here, the real forest primeval, and it's not hard to imagine that time itself has slowed or stopped even started running in circles, filling the air with all manner of secret magic.

"We're lost, aren't we?" Morgan asks from somewhere behind him.

Arthur spares her a glare, and starts fiddling with the GPS again.

"What did the old dragon say to you, anyway?" she continues, making a show of re-applying her sunblock. "You've been like a man possessed and I don't even know what we're looking for."

"Dr. Drake just showed me some of his research," Arthur says, "and I'm testing out a theory on his behalf." He doesn't say more, can't, because not even he quite understand why the professor's words burned in his brain with quite this intensity. Drake showed him old maps, old documents, and spoken of legends in a vague knowing way and let cigarette smoke curl out of his nostrils; but this trip was all Arthur, this idea, this inexplicable need to see if a line drawn from Caer Arianrhod to Stonehenge could be intersected by the angle of declination of Arcturus and then meet the third line of longitude and then...

"You know, if we get lost out here and starve to death, you don't have to worry about Sandhurst _or_ Oxford," Morgan adds cheerfully. Arthur favors her with a two-fingered salute. "Oh, yes, very mature. I should never have let you talk me into this."

"As I recall, you were the one who brought up the phrase 'adult supervision'--" But then he looks at the map, and the GPS, and suddenly a night's worth of subtending angles and Googling star charts makes sense. "This way," he says, and has to stop himself taking off at a run.

This way turns out to be an abandoned coal mine, and Morgan starts in on another rant about dying and how Gwen can't cover her shifts at the market forever, but when Arthur ventures inside she follows him and even holds the torch. The GPS totally fails four feet from the entrance, but Arthur's working off instinct now, some kind of deja-vu sense that coal was not the only reason for people to cut into these hills. Arthur stops when the shaft curls around to the right, looking at the irregular patterns in the stone wall where water and roots should never have been able to do their slow work.

"Arthur, don't," Morgan blurts out, when he reaches for the wall. It doesn't sound like winding him up, though; her face is pale in the yellowish light of the torch. "I...I have a bad feeling about this, okay? Let's just go back. We can still make it back to the motorway before dark if we leave now."

"After we've come all this way?" Arthur asks. "Look, there's probably nothing here, we'll just give it a try--you didn't even have to come this far, you know."

She just makes a face at him and holds the torch higher, and Arthur reaches for the wall again, running his hands down a crumbled shape that could almost be the figure of a dragon.

At that point, the wall disappears.

There's a little breath of old, dry air when the stone wall is just suddenly Not There, and Arthur takes a step back out of reflex, because it's one thing to listen your leathery old history professor ramble something about Merlin's Tomb and another thing completely to find the damn thing. He glances at Morgan, because if she asks him to leave it be again at this point a part of him would be tempted to agree. But she steels her face and actually leads the way into the new, smooth-floored passage, and Arthur has to keep up with her if he doesn't want to lose the torch.

There are hangings on the walls, tapestries that haven't faded or mildewed but come apart into dust at the first brush of fingers; they tell a story of monsters and demons and a king with a shining sword, but it's hard to pick out a narrative thread--things are jumbled and out of order. Arthur has a minute to think about cave-ins, but if the passage has held itself this long he doubts it'll chose now to crumble, but when up ahead Morgan gives a little shriek Arthur remembers that there is such a thing as dramatic irony.

Nothing's collapsing, though. Instead, the passage has flared wider--not really a room, but a space big enough for a marble plinth to sit in the middle with room to walk around. What made Morgan shriek is the man on the plinth, a man as dry and still as the tapestries. Not a skeleton, not a sarcophagus, but a whole man lying down like he'd just decided to have a bit of a kip, a man who looks healthy enough to jump up any minute and start talking, except for the part where he's not breathing.

"He's not breathing," Morgan says nervously.

"I can see that," Arthur replies, feeling strangely calm.

"Maybe--maybe he's been embalmed," she suggests. "A really, really good embalming job. Because he can't be...can he?"

Arthur almost doesn't want to touch the plinth in case it vanishes like the wall, but it doesn't; the man's hand is cool to the touch, but still warmer than the marble it rests on. He's not wearing a robe with stars and moons on it, but rather a long leather coat with a sort of neckerchief that together make him look more like a cowboy than an ancient wizard. "How do we, um...d'you think we should...?"

Arthur's not sure what he's asking, but Morgan immediately replies, "I'm not going to kiss him, if that's what you're asking."

"Oh, get over yourself," Arthur snorts, because the man in the cowboy coat is no sleeping beauty--barely older than them, with big ears and high, sharp cheekbones and just a bit of a five o'clock shadow. Not the wise old man he'd been expecting, to the extent he expected anything, but still no prize. Arthur tries leaning over next to the man's head. "Oi! Wake up, you!"

"Like that's really going to work," Morgan scoffs.

It doesn't, but Arthur maintains it was worth trying. As is poking him (which only leaves gaping holes in his clothes when they crumble like the tapestries) and shining the light in his eyes and shouting _Voldemort!,_ a suggestion Morgan will never live down. Arthur is considering smelling salts by the time Morgan checks her watch and points out, "We need to start heading back or we'll we hiking in the dark."

"In a minute," Arthur says, because he refuses to accept that they made it all the way to Merlin's Tomb and found--well, someone, though he doesn't look nearly dignified enough to be the Merlin. (Arthur's already started thinking of him as Colin, just to head off any potential disappointment.) And then remembers Morgan's original suggestion.

Hell, they've already tried shouting _Voldemort!_ at him. They are at the point of desperate measures.

Arthur looks at that face again--still no beauty, but it occurs to him that there's strength there, which is just as good. His lips are just barely parted, and his dark hair curls around his face in a way that would be enticing if Arthur could stop thinking about how it'd been like fifteen hundred years since he had a bath. "What are you doing?" Morgan asks when Arthur bends over the plinth, and he doesn't bother answering because it ought to be bloody obvious the moment his lips come down.

It turns out that this is a very awkward position to kiss someone in. Also, there's no immediate response, so Arthur's not sure if he should give up or wait or maybe he's doing it wrong. He tries pushing his lips a little into the man's--Merlin or Colin or whoever he is--because he's warm, and that's got to mean something, right? Maybe not. Arthur shifts around a bit so his neck's not bent quite so far and discovers it gives him a free hand to cup Merlin's face, so he can run a thumb under that ridiculous cheekbone and feel the fuzz of a fifteen hundred year shadow. Words wander into his head from deep in his subconscious: _And lips, the gates of breath, unseal with a righteous kiss._ That was probably wrong somehow, though, probably more Stratford-on-Avon than Camelot, but it was better than Harry Potter and so Arthur used his hand and his tongue to push his way into Merlin's mouth.

It's a wet kiss now, in addition to warm, and not so bad considering one of them hasn't brushed his teeth in fifteen hundred years. Arthur doesn't know how to kiss righteously exactly, but it's surprisingly nice to slide his tongue in and out, pull back a little to nip and nuzzle at Merlin's lips and then go in again to taste him. It's so nice that it takes him a moment to realize that he's being kissed back, that there's warm breath mixing with his own and a tongue sliding into his own mouth, slick and bizarrely familiar. It takes another long moment to pull back and look at Merlin, into his open eyes that shimmer sort of golden in the light of the torch, at his crooked smile.

"Hi," Arthur says, suddenly aware that he was snogging a wizard a moment ago and Morgan has the torch in two hands to keep from dropping it. "I...I'm Arthur. Arthur Penn."

"I know," Merlin says in perfectly intelligible English. "What took you so long?"


End file.
